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Friday, 16 October 2015

Ride, baby, ride

Of
Riders and Running Horses is a performance for five female dancers
(the marketing copy says six so I don't know what happened to the
other one but at this Dance
Umbrella showing it was definitely five) and two male musicians.

Of
Riders and Running Horses is getting to the club early, before most
people have arrived, and the few who are already there are just
standing around having drinks, and the DJ plays a song that is a bit
slow so it wouldn't work at midnight but it just so happens to be one
of your favourites so you dance and the floor is basically empty, smooth but not slippery, not soused in spilled
drinks, so you can really travel across it, exult in all that space,
and maybe one of your friends joins you and she's dancing different
but the same, and every time you catch each other's eyes you sing
along and laugh.

Of
Riders and Running Horses is that flick of the wrist or that toss of
the head or that curve of the body that hits the beat just right,
that sink of the knees, that quick step back, that spin, that pause,
that jitterbug jump.

It's
seeing someone else on the dance floor who somehow has every muscle
coordinated just so, stepping with and across the grain of the music
so effortlessly, so exquisitely, so unlike anyone else around her,
that you spend the rest of the evening – the rest of your life –
shaping your body to that memory.

Of
Riders and Running Horses is dancing until your knickers and bra are
soaked with sweat, dancing until your muscles ache, still dancing
because the music is there and it's yours, and even when you pause for a drink,
even if you're on the way to the toilet and quite in need of a pee,
if the right song comes on, a song that has a rope tied round your
heart, then it will yank you back to the dance floor no matter what,
and you will dance until you're breathless, because who needs breath
when the music is pulsing through you: who needs energy when the song
is there to feed you.

And
maybe, in its moments of synchronicity that are also individuated,
because each of the women do the same moves, but in their own
charismatic way, Of Riders and Running Horses is all the best nights
I've had with my dance group, not just performing but out for a
social, when one of our songs plays and we fall into a routine, and
it doesn't matter if we fuck up because we're a gang, we're together,
but still inclusive, because on the best nights, the really special
nights, the strangers around us catch the pattern of what we're doing
and cheerfully join in.

But Of
Rider and Running Horses isn't just dancing at dance nights: it's
dancing in the kitchen in the midst of washing up, peeling off rubber
gloves and whirling around in the space between the counters, however
tight, and singing, singing at the top of your voice, not caring how
wonky the notes are. It's dancing at the bus stop because the sun is
shining and the air is light, a lift of the heel, a tap of the toes,
hands drumming a rhythm on your stomach or your thighs.

It's
not walking but running, not for exercise, or to get somewhere
faster, running just because, because the wind is blowing through you
like you were made of gauze, because the air is charged with the
coming of spring, because walking won't answer this rush of blood
through your veins, so you run, pounding along the pavement, peeling
off into back streets for a clearer path, run to the river so you can
stand, breath ragged, gazing at the oily blue of the water and
its glimmering lights, and look up into the sky and imagine it full
of stars. It's running down hills and almost losing control, and
doing cartwheels in the park even though you haven't done a cartwheel
in years, and doing them makes you pull a fucking thigh muscle, but
who cares, because that surge of elation inside needs this
movement to honour it. It's being young, or it's
remembering what it was to be young, and doing that in a way that
isn't mournful but celebratory, that remembers you don't have to stop
being young, or dancing, or running, or behaving with abandon, just
because the years are ticking on.

And
because it's directed by Dan Canham, Of Riders and Running Horses is
also the memory of 30
Cecil Street, and the communities that form around and through
dancing, and the charge that those spaces for dancing carry; it has
moments of stillness and reflection like that show had, moments when
four of the women peel away and a single body remains, contemplative,
wondering, gathering resources, and those moments of calm make the
return of the group more vibrant, more rapturous and alive.

And
because Dan's associate director is Laura Dannequin, Of Riders and
Running Horses is watching Action Hero's Hoke's
Bluff for the second time, and realising that the tight-lipped
person playing the football referee, so sharp with the whistle, hands
slicing the air like scythes, was the same person who had performed a
solo piece called Hardy
Animal, about experiencing chronic back pain, that was so quiet
and so beautiful, not a trace of self-pity in it, just a
matter-of-fact discussion of what it is to live with pain, and how
blundering most people's questions and sympathies and expectations
around that are (I winced a lot watching it, remembering occasions
when I had blundered the same way), its movements carefully weighted,
warm and generous in its manipulations of the spine. And it's watching
Hoke's Bluff for the third time, and properly
appreciating how taut and precise Dannequin's movements, her referee
not quite emotionless but outside the story in a way that allows
Gemma and James to embrace wholeheartedly its longing for a better
way of living together, a better way of dreaming, a better way of
being young.

And
because one of the two musicians is Sam
Halmarack, Of Riders and Running Horses is those two blissful,
heart-bursting nights watching him play with the Miserablites
– the absolute fucking wonder of the Miserablites being us, the
audience – all making the show together, playing songs together
like it's the simplest thing in the world. I love Sam's voice:
there's something unearthly about it, a note of such sadness
harmonised with a note of such hope. As he sang the first song
tonight, there was a bit of my brain back in Edinburgh with Tassos
Stevens, singing the inexplicably euphoric chorus to the
Miserablites' finale: “Three in the back, two in the front, this is
how we drive when we're going to the concert”. And at the end, Of
Riders and Running Horses does exactly what Sam does in that show: it
invites everyone on to the dance floor, and the release of that is
exhilarating.

Of
Riders and Running Horses is all of these things and none of them.
It's the first time I ever saw a video of people breakdancing, the
hours I've spent watching dancers from the 60s on youtube, the dreams
I once had of moving to New York. It's the mornings I spent with
Chris Goode & Company in the Rabble R&D learning an Inuit
chant of unfamiliar rhythm, and every time I've danced lindy with a
partner so brilliant I forgot I can't actually do it. Of Riders and
Running Horses is the best fun I've had dancing while not actually
dancing. It is nothing that I think it is and everything you think it
is. One thing, definitely: it is a thing of total joy.